Whatever it was, it smelled awful and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. I thought something might be rotting down in the drain, so I spent a week treating the sink with bouts of Draino and baking soda and vinegar. It wasn’t helping, I kept getting whiffs of this acrid, rancid smell, especially at night when I was brushing my teeth. Finally, the other night, I accidentally knocked over the cup that holds our toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste and a puddle of rotten, gelatinous toothpaste goo spilled out across the bathroom counter. And this is something no one ever tells you about divorce: when you live alone, one of the things you will miss about being married is being able to call someone into the room when something like this happens and say to them, “Oh, my god. Smell this.”

Now that the terrible smell in the bathroom has been identified and dealt with, I’ve been noticing this mysterious musty mold smell in the rest of the house. I thought it might be the plant in the kitchen, the one in the windowsill that recently sprouted these strange yellow mushrooms in the soil surrounding the failing Creeping Charlie. I cleared those out, changed the cat litter, took out the garbage, and dug through the fridge to make sure nothing had gone bad, but I still smell it and it’s driving me crazy. I’m really just fed up with it all. I want my house to stop sending me on these smell-finding scavenger hunts, I want my hair to stop breaking off and clogging the shower drain, I want the dryer to stop taking an entire day to dry my clothes, and I want all those damn spiders to stop having babies on my back porch. This morning as I was clearing the breakfast plates, Babs told me, “Mom, you’re just like a waitress or something.” It took every ounce of self control I possessed to stay in that kitchen, to keep rinsing those plates instead of flinging the dishrag onto the counter and slamming the door on my way out. Also, my cat has been barfing again and I just find it so pathetic and hilarious that it has become normal for me to say, “Olive, stop eating your puke.”

I really just don’t understand why everything has to be so difficult. It seems like at some point things have to settle. But as soon as one terrible smell clears up, another one wafts in to replace it. When I am very old and visiting with my great-grandchildren, boring them with stories of the “Good Ol’ Days,” I am positive I will not be referring this period of my life. When I talk about my twenties, about raising young children and rental houses and new jobs, I’ll call it the “Smelly Days” or “The Decade When Everything Went Wrong But It Was Still Kind Of Funny At The Time.”

In the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of the characters is an old man who can no longer speak and has a heart full of remorse. Towards the end of the book he laments, “I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.” I thought that was so very sad. Truthfully, what is life but a constant search for that awful smell? We find it, fix it, things get better for a minute, and then something else starts to stink. It’s always something, and when I am very old and visiting with my great-grandchildren that is one thing I will be sure to tell them. “It’s always something, my dears. Something always smells bad and it takes time and patience and a sense of humor in order to clear the air again.” I’ll start telling this to them when they are very young, I’ll whisper it in their ears while they lie sleeping in their cradles, and I’ll also tell them the most important thing they can ever learn: I’ll tell them that you don’t have to love everyone, and not everyone has to love you. I will tell them the only people they need in their lives are the ones who will come into the room when you call, and when you say, “Oh, my god. Smell this,” they will. That’s what love is. That, right there.